Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Mar 20, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 22, 2019 - Apr 5, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 9, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Paid Advertising Approach to Youth Study Recruitment using Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook
ABSTRACT
Background:
Using social media for study recruitment is growing in popularity as an effective strategy in health research and evaluation. Targeted paid advertising is a useful modality to increase the reach and diversity of youth study participants. While the literature adequately describes the utility of Facebook in recruitment, limited understanding exists of social media platforms more popular with youth, specifically Instagram and Snapchat.
Objective:
This paper outlines a paid advertising approach using Instagram, and Snapchat in addition to Facebook to reach and evaluate youth exposed to a statewide marijuana prevention campaign.
Methods:
A social media recruitment strategy was used to conduct sequential cross-sectional surveys from youth in Colorado. Geographically targeted advertisements across three social media platforms encouraged completion of a self-administered survey. Ad design, placement, and analysis used Ad Words and Snap Ads.
Results:
Over two 1-month periods, 763,613 youth were reached (i.e., impressions), 6,089 were recruited (i.e., link clicks) and 828 eligible youth participated, completing online surveys about knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to retail marijuana.
Conclusions:
Recruitment and enrollment outcomes indicate the use of Instagram and Snapchat in addition to Facebook is a modern, useful, and cost-effective approach to reaching youth on sensitive health topics.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.